CLIMATE

@SAS

The School of Arts and Sciences brings indispensable intellectual range to understanding and addressing the problem of climate change. Our toolbox includes the methods and perspectives of humanists, scientists, and social scientists. The School’s faculty combine research with engagement and teach future leaders in climate solutions. This intellectual diversity provides a hub at Penn for far-reaching impact in addressing the climate emergency, in all its complexity.

Assessing the Problem

Solutions and Adaptations

Communicating the Issues

Translating into Policy

Meeting the Moment

Through the lens of time, humans represent little more than a passing shadow—present for just 0.007% of our planet’s 4.5-billion-year history and even now, with a population of nearly 8 billion, representing less than 0.01% of life on Earth. Despite this limited footprint, humanity has emerged as a force with the power to rapidly alter ecosystems, reduce biodiversity, warm the atmosphere and oceans, and change the fundamental equilibrium that has defined and supported life throughout our geologic era.

In this moment, there is no doubt that the response to climate change requires our best minds and resources. It’s a time for solutions.

We look to basic science for the discoveries that will lead to transformational alternatives to our dependence on fossil fuels and technologies that may mitigate some of climate change’s worst impacts. We need creative policy approaches that take into account the practical challenges of a threat that requires global cooperation—and we can’t overlook the obstacles that prevent us from taking necessary action. We must be willing to examine the complex connections between humans and nature, over time and cultures, to question and potentially change the practices and assumptions that have led us to this point of crisis.

Problems of this complexity require breadth in approach, and Penn Arts and Sciences is positioned to feed the work that needs to be done.

Teaching Future Leaders in Climate

Teaching about the problem of climate change from the perspectives of diverse disciplines is embedded in curricular options at the School of Arts and Sciences across all divisions—from undergraduate courses and majors to doctoral and masters programs and certificates.

Our Climate Experts

Faculty from departments across the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities are fueling research into our climate crisis and its solution.

Faculty Bookshelf

Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees

Historian Jared Farmer surveys the complex history of the world’s oldest trees, including voices of Indigenous peoples, religious figures, and contemporary scientists who study elderflora in crisis.

Horizon Work: At the Edges of Knowledge in an Age of Runaway Climate Change

Adriana Petryna of Anthropology offers a new way of thinking about the climate crisis as an exercise in delimiting knowable, and habitable, worlds

Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons from Earth’s Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis

Michael Mann of Earth and Environmental Sciences writes about how our era of global warming can hold opportunities for creative growth, if we act now.

Galápagos: Life in Motion

A photographic study by Philosophy’s Michael Weisberg and coauthor Walter Perez of the survival behaviors of land and sea mammals in the Galápagos Islands.

Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai

Nikhil Anand of Anthropology explores the politics of Mumbai’s water infrastructure to demonstrate how citizenship emerges through the efforts to control, maintain, and manage the city’s water.